Hysterical - Listen Now: Legacy

Episode Date: April 13, 2025

From Wondery and Goalhanger Podcasts, Afua Hirsch and Peter Frankopan tell the wild stories of some of the most extraordinary men and women ever to have lived – and ask whether they have the rep they deserve. In the latest season, the podcast explores the legacy of Sigmund Freud. Hysterical has illustrated many of the outdated medical biases still shape women’s healthcare today – and Sigmund Freud’s ideas and theories about the mind form the basis of so much contemporary psychology. The very beginning of Freud’s interest in the way we think was inspired by his observations of so-called ‘hysterics’ and many of his most famous case studies focus on young women. Some people say that Freud was the first to take women’s mental health seriously but others point the finger at him as the architect of the idea that women were mentally fragile and in need  of ‘curing’ by men who knew better.Listen to Legacy on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge episodes early and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/legacy now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi, Hysterical listeners. I'm Peter Frankipan and I'm here with a recommendation for a podcast I host alongside the brilliant Afua Hirsch called Legacy. Aw, thanks Peter. In Legacy, we dive into the lives of some of history's most influential figures from Margaret Thatcher to Napoleon, JFK to Cleopatra, unpacking what their pasts reveal about our present. In our latest season, we're exploring the legacy of Sigmund Freud. Hysterical illustrates many of the outdated medical biases that still shape women's healthcare today.

And Sigmund Freud's ideas and theories about the mind form the basis of so much contemporary psychology. The very beginning of Freud's interest in the way we think was inspired by his observations of so-called hysterics, and many of his most famous case studies focus on young women. Some people say that Freud was the first to take women's mental health seriously, but others point the finger at him as the architect of the idea that women were mentally fragile and in need of curing by men who knew better. We're about to play you a clip from our latest season. In this clip, we're talking about

Freud's seminal publication, The Interpretation of Dreams. It didn't make much of an impact at the time, but it's transformed the way we think about our subconscious. You'll also hear from Freud expert and psychoanalyst Brett Carr, who really helped us get into the mind of Freud. If you like what you hear, search and follow Legacy wherever you get your podcasts. So it's early winter 1899. The 19th century is drawing to a close, but it's not the end of an era. In fact, in Europe, the Belle Epoque is at its height. It's a time of peace, economic prosperity, and flourishing cultural innovations.

And in Vienna, Freud is about to publish a book that will put his name on the map. Eventually. Before his star can rise, his ideas need to find an audience. But perhaps even liberal Europe isn't ready for them. If you've ever heard of any book by Sigmund Freud, it's going to be this one. It's The Interpretation of Dreams. It's published on November the 4th, 1899. Freud is 43. Only 600 copies are printed. But you know how long it takes to sell all of those afwa? Eight years! Do you know why that's not what I want to hear? I'm 43 and I'm hoping that the book

I'm currently writing is going to do for me what the interpretation of dreams did for Freud, but I'm not trying to wait eight years to reap the rewards. You're going to sell 250 at your book launch. Come off it. Freud takes two years to sell 250 copies, but maybe the most notable thing about the book is it introduces the famous idea of the Oedipus complex, which outlines, during the so-called phallic phase as Freud terms it, of between three and six years old, children experience unconscious sexual desires for their opposite sex parent and rivalry with their same sex parent. It's named the Oedipus complex because of the tragedy by the famous Greek playwright

Sophocles in which Oedipus, the king of Thebes, inadvertently kills his father and marries his mother. Okay, Peter, come on, we've got to get a little bit personal. Have you ever had fantasies of having sex with your mother and murdering your father? No, I haven't. No. And in fact, I'm slightly threatened by the idea that I might have done. No. How about you? Well, this is more a boy mother thing. But I have to say, I've been reading about different writers' relationships with Freud. And I read this essay about this young man who kept creating art and giving it to his mother. And he thought it was, for example, a road leading to a sunset

only for his mother to look at it and just see like a throbbing erect penis. Sorry, this is maybe too graphic language. But I think it's one of those things that once it's been said, like don't put your finger in the plug socket, that it's almost impossible not to then think about it. Freud describes this book as the royal road to the knowledge of the unconscious in mental life. And although it's not widely read, criticism, as you would expect, is directed at how unscientific dream interpretation is and how easy it would be to influence patients with his own ideas. But over time, it's fair to say Freud's ideas start to gain traction with intellectuals

and with psychologists, and within 10 years it's become recognised as not just a foundational, but maybe the foundational text in psychology. Let's just talk a bit about how Freud came to write this seminal book, The Interpretation of Dreams. To understand that, we need to look back to 1895, when Freud completed his first dream analysis, a dream he referred to as Irma's injection. Analyzing its symbolism and themes, Freud concluded it was about his wish for exoneration from mishandling a patient's treatment. And then he continued his dream analysis, recording his dreams in a daily journal.

I think that that process what Freud was trying to do was to try to deal with grief. So his father had died in 1896 and Freud was dealing, as is usually the case when a close relative dies, with unresolved emotions and memories from his childhood. Writing to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, he says, through some of the dark paths behind the official consciousness, the old man's death has moved me very much. I now have an uprooted feeling. By the summer of 1897, alongside his dream analysis, Freud begins a daily practice of self-analysis. He's exploring and analysing childhood memories, fantasies and emotional reactions and looking to uncover the unconscious roots of his psychological conflicts and behaviours. Now if you listen to our first programme in this series on Sigmund Freud, you'll

know that we've enlisted some expert help with some of the finer points of Freud's work and his life in the shape of Professor Brett Carr. He's honorary director of research at the Freud Museum, a Freud scholar and a psychoanalyst himself. And he's the man to talk about the significance of this book. Brett, The Interpretation of Dreams is now seen as one of the most important books of the whole of the 20th century, partly because of its interdisciplinary impact on psychology, culture and art, but it didn't sell on release. Was the world just not ready? His book was first printed in the month of October 1899 and unsurprisingly the publishers put the date 1900 on the front page to really indicate that this was the start of a new era. So 600 books in eight years was a very very poor set of sales and whether that was due to the fact that the publishers were

not very good at publicizing, that I cannot say. But there would have been something considered very, very unusual in the book because nobody had really written properly on the psychology of dreams. Dreams had of course been part of the human discourse for thousands of years, as you two will both know. Ancient Greeks commented on dreams quite extensively, but did not link dreams to early childhood experiences, particularly early traumatic experiences and indeed sexual experiences.

And really the main takeaway point from Freud's dream book of 1900 is that dreams represent the kinds of thoughts and wishes and desires and hatreds that we cannot bear to express or even think consciously during the daytime. So he was really being very bold in that book. Has that theory stood up, Brett? Is that still how dreams are regarded by modern psychology and psychoanalysis today? I think that the dream analysis is one of the areas of Freud's works that has perhaps been the least controversial because everybody knows that no two people dream in quite the same way. But dreams are really like watching Netflix. These are dramatic nighttime experiences that

we all have as human beings. You know, most people would simply wake up and they might say to their spouse, oh, last night I dreamt that my father died or my uncle died, that sort of thing. And the spouse might just say, oh, don't worry, it was just a dream. That phrase is so frequently used in the English language, it was just a dream. But really, the main conclusion of Freud's book is that a dream is not just a dream, it's a huge source of data about the hidden and conflictual aspects of our mind.